© 2024 Wyoming Public Media
800-729-5897 | 307-766-4240
Wyoming Public Media is a service of the University of Wyoming
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Transmission & Streaming Disruptions

Protest In Cheyenne Calls For End To Family Separation

Tennessee Watson
/
Wyoming Public Radio

Close to 100 people gathered outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office in Cheyenne Saturday evening to protest the separation of migrant families at the U.S. - Mexico border. The event was organized by Juntos, which means together in Spanish.

Ana Castro, an organizer with Juntos, addressed the crowd with a bullhorn.

“This country that has been built on the backs of immigrants time and time again has once again turned its back on America’s biggest working class,” Castro said. “To those families with broken hearts and wrenched souls today, we say to you: No están solos. You are not alone.”

Castro also spoke out against plans to build a private immigrant detention center in Evanston.

Laramie resident Sarah Duncan traveled to Cheyenne for the rally. While she’s appalled by the current policies she told the crowd gathered that the U.S. has a long history of separating families, from slavery to Native American children being sent away to school.

“And so that doesn’t mean we can’t demand greatness for this country and this doesn’t mean that we can’t do better but I do want to push us to think about what it would look like to find healing and do real justice as a way of then being a great country,” Duncan said.

Protests happened across the country Saturday from large cities to towns in rural Maine. More than 2,000 children remain separated from their parents.

Tennessee -- despite what the name might make you think -- was born and raised in the Northeast. She most recently called Vermont home. For the last 15 years she's been making radio -- as a youth radio educator, documentary producer, and now reporter. Her work has aired on Reveal, The Heart, LatinoUSA, Across Women's Lives from PRI, and American RadioWorks. One of her ongoing creative projects is co-producing Wage/Working (a jukebox-based oral history project about workers and income inequality). When she's not reporting, Tennessee likes to go on exploratory running adventures with her mutt Murray.
Related Content